Epidemiological Research: An Introduction

pHaving last year published "Up from Clinical Epidemiology & EBM" and also "Epidemiological Research: Terms and Concepts,"� Miettinen now - this time with collaboration from his junior colleague I. Karp - brings out this further introduction into epidemiological research; and he is now working on an introduction into clinical research, for publication next year.� It evidently is Miettinen's felt time to crystallize the basic understandings he has come to as the culmination of a half-century of concentrated effort to advance the theory of epidemiological and 'meta-epidemiological clinical' research./pp�/ppIn accord with its title, this book focuses on research to develop the knowledge-base for preventive medicine, which mainly is knowledge about the causal origin -etilogy, etiogenesis - of illness.� It first illustrates how wanting this knowledge still is, despite much research; and it then aims to guide the reader to more productive etiogenetic research./pp�/ppThis book places much emphasis on the need to assure relevance by principles-guided objects design for the studies, which now remains conspicuously absent from epidemiologists' concerns.� And as for methods design, this book exposes the fallacies in the still-common 'cohort' and 'case-control' studies, defines the essentials of all etiogenetic studies, and then addresses the true options for design in this framework of shared essentials./pp�/ppA good deal of attention is also given to the still commonly-held, very major, twin fallacies that screening for an illness is a preventive intervention, to be studied by randomized trials, and that research on it can imply rational guidelines or recommendations regarding decisions about the screening./pp�/ppWhile Miettinen already is regarded as 'the father of modern epidemiology,' he now appears to have become the father also of post-modern epidemiology, where 'epidemiology' still means epidemiological research./p